


I'd say it was a rough night, but I wasn't really there

by chrundletheokay



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Borderline Personality Disorder, Dissociation, Eating Disorders, M/M, Parent/Child Incest, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, it really isn't y'all, it's always sunny is a show about trauma, mac voice: THIS IS NOT SEXY!!!, me writing thousands of words on charlie and dennis and their childhood trauma, this is the hill i will die on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-20 15:26:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18527842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrundletheokay/pseuds/chrundletheokay
Summary: That’s the thing about the other kind of wound, the kind you can’t see, the kind no one else can see: no time has ever passed at all, even when it objectively has.





	I'd say it was a rough night, but I wasn't really there

**Author's Note:**

> Okay. So. My first ever attempt at writing fic was a long, meandering, emotional train wreck. Over 93k words, y'all. A lot of it sucks and is OOC, but there are bits that I think/hope are salvageable. I go back through it periodically, and like... metaphorically poke it with a stick, to see what happens. This is a "chapter" from it that actually works for me.
> 
> I feel like it works okay out of the context of the fic. But uhhhh, the context is this: The gang? They're human disasters. All of them.
> 
>  
> 
> *** TW: references to past childhood sexual abuse, including by a parent (Dennis's mom) ***  
> *** also TW: self-harm, blood, eating disorder, dissociation ***
> 
>  
> 
> .

Mac had whipped up a surprisingly palatable supper for the two of them, so Dennis agreed to do the dishes on his own —  _“I’m tired of you chipping all the goddamn dishes, Mac” —_  except now it’s late and he’s tired and more than a little drunk. The longer he stares into the sink full of soapy water, the more his eyes glaze over and his body grows heavy. With wet, prune-y dishwashing fingers he reaches half-blind for the next object: a kitchen knife Mac must have used to dice up the vegetables.

Examining the stainless steel blade calls to mind the image of a series of angry red lines zig-zagging across Charlie’s arm. They’re healing, scabbing over. That’s the thing about it: those were always the kind of wounds that could be patched up, healed over; no booze, no stuffing it down with brown required.

Although Dennis remembers reading about scurvy in undergrad, and how a body, depleted of the vitamin C necessary to make collagen, begins to split apart at the seams, as it were. Old wounds open up and bleed as if no time had passed at all.

That’s the thing about the other kind of wound, the kind you can’t see, the kind no one else can see: no time has ever passed at all, even when it objectively  _has_.

Since Charlie came in to the bar with an arm bandaged up, Dennis has been trying to remember when he himself had started, when he’d stopped, and why, and how. He remembers a series of small red cuts on his inner thighs, across his hipbones, his stomach — anywhere  _mommy_  wouldn’t see, because  _you are_ not _like your sister, Dennis Reynolds. You will_ not _carve into yourself like a prize fucking ham_. _I won’t allow it._

_Stop. Stop stop stop, Dennis. Don’t go there. Don’t._

A sharp bite at his arm and a sudden clattering startle him back to the present moment. He looks down, and inhales sharply, because—

“Dennis?” Mac’s voice calls out from the living room.

—his arm is bleeding, and the knife is in the sink. It hurts because he’s real. It hurts the same, after all these years; it does. It still hurts the same; it always did. It always hurts the same, except—

“Hey, are you alright in there, dude?”

—when it doesn’t, because when he was fifteen the blade stopped working, but the sharp pain of hunger became its own form of salvation. Ms. Klinsky was right: he was so  _perfect_  once he lost that last little bit of baby fat, and starvation did it for him.  _He_  did it for  _himself_. He was so perfect, and unmarred by—

“Jesus Christ, Dennis. Oh, goddamnit.”

Mac’s there, talking so loud in Dennis’s ringing ears. There’s a hand grabbing at Dennis’s wrist, and Mac is cursing more and manhandling him, leading him he doesn’t know where.

But he doesn’t fight it and he can’t speak, can’t stop staring at the bright red dripping down his forearm, dripping down the cuts he sees in his mind’s eye on his thighs, his stomach, his hips. Dennis is fourteen, and mommy’s mad at him for cutting open his arm again. And he’s not really here, not anymore; but then again, was he ever really?

A short time later, Dennis finds himself in the bathroom, holding onto a piece of ice as Mac — muttering angrily to himself all the while — is finishing patching Dennis’s arm up with butterfly bandages, a truly unnecessary amount of Neosporin, and shit ton of bandaids on top. Dee’s shoddy bandaging was nothing compared to this. Mac would make a terrible nurse.

“There, that oughta hold it,” Mac says, and it’s loud enough that it seems like it’s actually directed at Dennis this time, rather than an internal narrative being spoken aloud.

Dennis still feels numb, which is confusing, because that’s not how he remembered the aftermath from when he used to do this.

He searches Mac’s face for a clue as to how angry the man is, and how likely it is that Mac will let his guard down or get distracted, so that Dennis can go back for more. More is always better: more cuts, more hunger, more weight lost, more beer, more women, more crack, more, more, more. Always more.

“You back?” Mac asks.

Dennis opens his mouth to answer, but can’t figure out how to make any sound come out, can’t find the words anyway. He shakes his head.

“No? The ice didn’t help?” Mac sounds disappointed.

It helped a little. Maybe. But there’s still that feeling of detachment, that thick layer of haze separating him from the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter too much, though; he’s used to it. There’s still nothing to say, nothing to do, nothing to be done.

With shaking hands, Dennis drops the melting ice into the sink, and begins to idly pick at the bandages on his arm. Mac gently brushes his hands away.

He tries to take Dennis through a series of questions, the kind Dennis secretly suspects were maybe were designed to test a person for dementia or head trauma:  _Do you know where you are? What month is it? What year is it? Dennis are you alright will you please say something you’re—_

“—really scaring me, dude,” Mac says.

Finally, finally, he’s able to get a sound to come out. It’s only an embarrassing little whining sound that barely escapes from the back of his throat, but it’s a sound nonetheless. Dennis buries his face in his hands and groans a little louder.

“Alright. Alright, okay,” Mac murmurs.

Mac is hushing him, and all of a sudden he’s enclosed in Mac’s arms. It’s a little suffocating and scary, but all of a sudden he finds there are firm boundaries for where he exists in space, and he’s starting to be able to feel them again:  _My body ends where Mac’s starts. My body starts where Mac’s stops._

Mac’s rubbing a firm hand up and down Dennis’s back, quietly jabbering nonsense into his ear: “You’re safe, Dennis. You’re in our apartment and you’re safe. Please come back; please don’t leave me. You’re okay Dennis, you’re okay,” and on and on.

As Dennis starts to come back into his body, he wonders exactly whom Mac is trying to convince here.

He knows Mac worries that when Dennis dissociates, it means his soul has literally left his body. And he knows that Mac worries his soul might get lost on the way back into his body. What Mac doesn’t know is that Dennis never had a soul in the first place. Or if he did have one, he wouldn’t blame it for not wanting to come back.

Mac’s prattling off facts about the day and time and their location, and retelling anecdotes about the gang’s adventures over the last few days.

Somewhere along the way, Dennis’s brain grasps onto another idea, just as reassuring as the earlier realization about his body:  _If Mac can see me, if Mac is talking to me and touching me, I must be real._

“Fuck,” he whispers into Mac’s shoulder.

“Yeah?” Mac asks, hopeful.

“Fuck,” Dennis repeats. It’s louder this time, more confident.

“A little better?”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Um, Mac…”

Mac lets go, steps back a bit, still keeping Dennis grounded to the earth with firm hands on each of his shoulders.

“What happened?” Mac asks.

“I, um, I guess I must’ve cut my arm a little bit with the kitchen knife,” he mutters.

“Yeah, Den, you  _did_.  _Why,_ ” Mac demands.

“Hell if I know,” Dennis exclaims. “I wasn’t there. Move past it.”

“You weren’t there when you—Okay, yeah, I guess I can see that. But  _why_  weren’t you there?”

Dennis’s heart starts racing, his hands clench into fists, and he explodes: “I don’t know, dude! What is this, 20 questions?”

“I thought you said you don’t do this any—” Mac is saying, but Dennis is interrupting, and the words are out of his mouth before he even realizes what he’s saying, “My mom never liked it when I—” 

He stops cold; Mac does, too.

“When you what?” Mac prompts him.

“When I… you know...” Dennis gestures at his bandaged arm.

“Wouldn’t think so,” Mac responds wryly. “That why you stopped?”

He snorts. “No. That’s why I started hiding it better. Places she wouldn’t see.”

He can see the rusty gears turning in Mac’s brain, as if he’s weighing out multiple questions in his mind, trying to decide which to ask first. “You have any others we should take care of, then?” he asks at last.

“No. Just, uh, just the one.”

“You sure? You don’t have to show me, if they’re anywhere… I can just step out and leave you to, you know…” Mac trails off awkwardly.

“No, Mac, I swear. Just the one.”

“Alright.” Mac steps all the way back, leans against the wall opposite Dennis, and starts to fidget with his hands. “Hey, Dennis,” he says in a pained voice, “I just wanted you to know…”

Dennis’s heart starts racing again at this, because this can’t be good. This does not sound or look like the beginning of a sentence he wants to hear, or a conversation he wants to have.

“Like, you don’t have to talk about it, but I just—I wanted you to know that Dee told me the other day. Um, about—that something happened with your mom. Something bad. She didn’t say what, and like I said, you don’t have to talk about it or whatever. But I didn’t want you to find out like, months from now, or whenever, that I knew the whole time. So I just wanted you to know that, uh—yeah, that I know. But like, not really. I don’t really know… anything at all.”

Dennis feels like he’s just had a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.

“Hey, it’s alright, Den,” Mac says, his voice louder, more confident, all reassurance. Except it isn't alright, because now Mac knows about the shit Dennis was intent on taking to his fucking grave, and _goddamn Dee_ for telling.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up now. We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to talk about anything if you don’t want to. It’s okay."

“Dishes,” Dennis finally chokes out.

“What?” Mac raises his eyebrows, face a picture of utter confusion at this rapid change of subject.

“Did I… finish the dishes?” He grits his teeth and clenches his jaw with the effort of forcing these words out through the fog descending over his brain once more.

“The  _dishes_?” Mac repeats. “Oh, I don’t know, dude. I don’t think so? You don’t have to if you’re not feeling up to it, Den. I can take care of it.”

“Can we…?”

Mac puzzles this over for a minute, and Dennis feels his face flush with embarrassment at once again being reduced to slow, childlike speech and odd sentence fragments.

“Do ‘em together?” Mac asks. “Yeah, man, sure. They’ll get done a lot more faster that way, anyway.”

Mac leads the way to the kitchen. They stand in silence as Mac washes and rinses the dishes, and Dennis dries and puts them away.

There are no more knives to take care of, except the one Dennis had dropped into the sink. When Mac thinks Dennis isn’t paying attention, he washes it and dries it and puts it away with more subtlety than he’s ever seen in Mac. More subtlety, in fact, than he would have believed Mac was capable of. Although, even after the sharps items are safely tucked away in their drawer, Dennis can still feel his best friend’s eyes glancing over now and then, checking on him as he goes through the motions of being a normal human being and doing the dishes.

It doesn’t take long before the kitchen’s in an acceptable state once more. Dennis drags his tired body to the bathroom to brush and floss and go through a half-assed execution of his nighttime skincare routine. He changes into his biggest and baggiest pajamas, and finds Mac pacing up and down the length of the living room.

Mac stops and looks up, watching curiously as Dennis moves to wait by the open door to Mac’s bedroom.

“You—” Mac starts to ask, but seems to realizes Dennis isn’t going to say anything. “Okay,” he agrees, like he’s heard the unspoken question nevertheless. “Yeah. My room?”

Dennis doesn’t know why he’s asking for permission (or trying to), when normally, he simply takes what’s his. Or what should be his. That attitude must have gone wherever his voice went; he’s too tired search for it just now.

All he knows is that he doesn’t want to be alone in his king-sized bed tonight, in his big room, surrounded by his too-familiar things. Not now, not like this, not when he feels so separated from the Dennis who created that space and accumulated all those lifeless objects.

Instead, he wants the familiarity of Mac’s dingy, austere room — and the familiarity of the man himself, if he’s being honest. Just as importantly, he wants the sense of safety he gets knowing Mac is there to tether him to reality. Mac won’t leave him to drift at sea in his own mind all night. Mac is a big solid anchor, and goddamn if Dennis isn’t unmoored.

He drags his sock feet into Mac’s room, and into the familiar comfort of his hideous sheet set (which, in itself, is admittedly an improvement from the old days of the bare mattress and ratty comforter). It’s not long before the bed shifts beside Dennis, followed by an awareness of Mac staring at him, thinking far too loudly in the dark silence of his bedroom.

“Dennis?” He finally says, quietly. “I know you don’t like me saying this, but I love you, dude. Still. And, you know, always.”

There’s no way for Dennis to sound anything but pathetic when all he wants to say in response is a string of desperate, pathetic, nonsense thoughts like:  _never stop saying it, Mac, don’t ever stop, not even when I call you a liar, not even when I think I hate you for saying it, because I don’t, I couldn’t ever, I couldn’t ever hate it, or you._

He’s emotionally exhausted anyway, too tired to try to get his mouth to work again. So instead, he settles for scooting closer to Mac, nestling himself into Mac’s chest, tucking his head into the warm space under Mac’s chin. He clings on as tight as he can, like that isn’t pathetic and telling in its own way.

He feels Mac exhale shakily against him, and wrap his own arms around Dennis. He’s aware of the warm feeling of being enveloped, safe, and loved; and then there’s a peaceful nothing as sleep quickly overtakes him.

**Author's Note:**

> I read another fic on here a while back about Dennis having been abused by his mother, and it was incredibly triggering but??? my brain seems to have accepted that as a headcanon of sorts.
> 
> I recently reworked a bit of this into another fic I posted on here (in particular, the horrible thing Dennis' mother says to him about his self-harm). So if parts of this look familiar, that's why. The other one is called "time is an ocean (variations on the color red)" (idk how to link. technology???) https://archiveofourown.org/works/17974799
> 
> Oh yeah, also: Ice? A safer alternative to self-harm, and a way of grounding oneself while dissociating.


End file.
